History of Japan
Detalls del Canal
History of Japan
This podcast, assembled by a former PhD student in History at the University of Washington, covers the entire span of Japanese history. Each week we'll tackle a new topic, ranging from prehistoric Japan to the modern day.
Episodis Recents
644 episodis
Bonus episode - The Chishima Incident
We're coming up on the end of the school year here in the US and will have to briefly interrupt our normal programming. To tide you over, here's a bon...
Episode 629 - Flowering Fortunes, Part 4
Fate twists once again in Fujiwara no Michinaga's favor as an unfortunate accident of birth sees him solidify his grip on power. This week: the final...
Episode 628 - Flowering Fortunes, Part 3
Fujiwara no Michinaga is on top of the world, but there's one final hurdle to overcome. His deceased brother's daughter is still the leader of the emp...
Episode 627 - Flowering Fortunes, Part 2
This week: Fujiwara no Kaneie is a name we've encountered once before on the podcast. But now we get to see him in his element as a wheeler and dealer...
Episode 626 - Flowering Fortunes, Part 1
We're starting a new series taking a look at an oft neglected classic of Heian literature: The Eiga Monogatari, or Tale of Flowering Fortunes, which t...
Episode 625 - An Ocean Between Us, Part 3
This week: in 1988, a Japanese company bought a paper mill in Port Angeles, WA, in a story that basically nobody except one reporter from the Seattle...
Episode 625 - An Ocean Between Us, Part 2
This week: rumors swirled around Port Angeles for decades after WWII that a Japanese man, Osasa Masaru, who had lived there from 1930-39 was in fact a...
Episode 624 - An Ocean Between Us, Part 1
This week: what role does a sleepy town in Washington's Olympic Peninsula play in Japan's history? Well, more than you'd think. We'll look at three di...
Episode 623 - The Great Peace, Part 2
This week: how does the Taiheiki depict its most famous characters? How does it describe the downfall of the Hojo? And from that, what can we say abou...
Episode 622 - The Great Peace, Part 1
The Taiheiki is arguably one of the most dismissed works of literature in Japanese history, doomed to always exist solely in comparison to the far mor...
Episode 621 - The Manga Revolution, Part 3
This week: the manga industry during World War II. Plus some thoughts on the development of shojo manga, and finally a look at Tezuka Osamu and the wa...
Episode 620 - The Manga Revolution, Part 2
Histories of manga tend to skip from the colorful woodblocks of the Edo period directly to the post-WWII industry we'd recognize today. But what do we...
Episode 619 - The Manga Revolution, Part 1
This week: manga is today one of the most ubiquitous forms of entertainment in Japan. But the idea of comics as we might understand them has a much lo...
Episode 618 - Live by the Sword
This week, we're tackling the most legendary samurai in Japanese history: Miyamoto Musashi. Why is he so famous, what do we actually know about him, a...
Episode 617 - I am Legend, Part 4
This week, we cover how the legend of Yoshitsune as told in Gikeiki describes his demise. Which is how his tale ends, unless of course you know the tr...
Episode 616 - I am Legend, Part 3
This week, we come to the text that more than any other helps build the Yoshitsune legend: Gikeiki. Here, at long last, we see the legend of Yoshitsun...
Episode 615 - I am Legend, Part 2
This week, the Yoshitsune legend finds its legs with Heike Monogatari--one of the most epic works in Japanese history. Except that while Yoshitsune is...
Episode 614 - I am Legend, Part 1
Note: I made a mistake recording this episode but did not have time to go back and fix it. It's episode 614!
This week, we're starting a three-p...
Episode 613 - I am a Cat
This week, we're covering one of the most titanic names in Japanese literature--Natsume Soseki--and the work that propelled him to fame. How did the t...
Episode 612 - The Final Frontier, Part 8
This week: Japanese Manchuria comes crashing down as a combination of poorly planned colonial policies and a worsening war situation see imperial powe...
Episode 611 - The Final Frontier, Part 7
This week: some reflections on the hollow nature of Manchurian "independence", and on what kept the state going if so few of its own residents believe...
Episode 610 - The Final Frontier, Part 6
This week on the podcast: the Japanese presence in Manchuria was never particularly large, even at its height. So how did Japanese rule in Manchuria l...
Episode 609 - The Final Frontier, Part 5
In the last episode of 2025: a bomb "mysteriously" goes off just outside Mukden during the evening of September 18, 1931. Less than six months later,...
Episode 608 - The Final Frontier, Part 4
As Japan enters the 1920s, national policy becomes increasingly liberalized--but Manchuria remains a holdout of extremists who, if anything, begin to...
Episode 607 - The Final Frontier, Part 3
This week: Japan's military and civilian leaders find themselves at a crossroads in Manchuria in the 1910s, as views begin to split around what the po...
Episode 606 - The Final Frontier, Part 2
This week: after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan inherited a rather unusual arrangement in Manchuria, which would become the basis of its empire in the...
Episode 605 - The Final Frontier, Part 1
This week, we're turning our attention to possibly the most unique of Japan's colonial ventures during the imperial era: Manchuria. Most know about Ma...
Episode 604 - The Bureaucrats, Part 3
For a long time, the bureaucracy--in all its elitist, meritocratic glory--has taken a great deal of the credit for Japan's postwar economic miracle. B...
Episode 603 - The Bureaucrats, Part 2
This week: the Meiji Bureaucracy, in all its glory. How did the system actually work? What sorts of people did it attract? And what happened when the...
Episode 602 - The Bureaucrats, Part 1
In America, when we think of bureaucracy, it doesn't conjure the best associations. In Japan, meanwhile, the bureaucracy has a long history as one of...
Episode 601 - On Grad School (w/Charlotte Lai!)
One of the questions I get asked a lot is about grad school: what's it like, who's it for, what applications are like, and so on. But I've been out of...
Episode 600 - The Six-Hundredth Episode
Here we are again, my friends! It's been two years since our last Q and A, and now it's time for a new one. Thank you all for your questions, and here...
Episode 599 - Ain't It Grand?
This week, we're talking about one of the oddest moments of the final years of feudalism: a spontaneous outbreak of dancing and religious worship coll...
Episode 598 - Koume's World, Part 5
This week, we're finishing our time with Kawai Koume by looking at how life in Wakayama had changed by the mid-1870s. Feudalism is no more, Confuciani...
Episode 597 - Koume's World, Part 4
This week, the Kawai family has finally made good in the world of feudal Wakayama--just in time for that world to come down around their ears. How did...
Episode 596 - Koume's World, Part 3
After a long hiatus, the diary of Kawai Koume picks back up in 1853, a year of absolutely no world-shaking importance in Japanese history whatsoever-w...
Episode 595 - Koume's World, Part 2
This week, we'll look at the first chunk of Kawai Koume's diary, which deals with life in the 1830s--or as she knew it, the Tenpo Era. What can we lea...
Episode 594 - Koume's World, Part 1
This week, we're starting a new miniseries focused on the life of Kawai Koume, a samurai woman living in Wakayama in the early 1800s. Today is going t...
Episode 593 - The Artist of the Open Road, Part 3
This week, we wrap up our series on Hiroshige with a few lingering questions about his career. How much does his "artistic borrowing" really matter? W...
Episode 592 - The Artist of the Open Road, Part 2
This week, we're covering Hiroshige's emergence as an artist, which took 20 years after he finished his apprenticeship in the Utagawa school. Why the...